As the sun is slowly setting on 2023, I’d like to take a moment to appreciate the lovely staff at Walter Andersen Nursery who have so generously supported my budding gardening hobby throughout this year. Offering guidance ranging from the basics to pro tips, the spade-loving free spirits operating this family-owned San Diego company have weathered my deluge of questions with tireless gusto. Even when I test them hard, they spring back with a smile upon each visit. Thank you, fellow seedlings, one and all, for sharing your passion with me and including a bearded sunflower like myself in your community.  

You see, this year has coached me deeply about gardening as a living philosophy. If we are immortalized at all in this life, or at least redeemed, it’s solely through our (inter)actions with other beings. Once you get past the soiled truth that gardening may be the only hobby in which you’re expected to kill what you’re attempting to nurture (at least during the learning process—without the fatal consequence of waking up behind bars) then an entire field opens up in one’s heart ripe with moral allegory.

On the surface, gardening is riddled with context and complexity. When attending to plants, you must consider a horde of shifting variables, including soil type, exposure to sunlight, water, humidity, etc. But, beneath the surface, it all comes down to two simple factors that are solely within your control: intention and attention. Intention itself is not enough. Beyond the desire to maintain the plant life under your stewardship, you must take the right action to assure the right results. In other words, 1) where do you place your focus and 2) how much effort do you commit to nurturing what you claim to care for?

What good do mere words do for a thirsty gazania? Will prayers alone brighten the light-deprived violet? Does the carnivorous plant care at all about the gardener’s vegan lifestyle? Here’s the viny tangle of the matter: Human relationships, goals, and projects follow the same physics. Our attention is our blessing. We neglect this at our peril.

Please remember that each of you spade-wielding gardeners is a poet and philosopher, killer and savior, spun from the gravity of a thousand moons. The world—this world—is yours to care for. You belong—we belong—to the infinite present in an inescapable union, being bride and groom alike. By cultivating clear attentionality in this cosmic consciousness, we can smell the Milky Way within a bed of flowers charged with the same miracle of a newborn’s first breath. 

Now, if you know how to tend to simple soil, you know how to mend human hearts. What precisely will you do about it?